The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron Page B

here, you dad-dratted no-good an’mal! I’ll get hold of you at last, black bastard !” Fleet as a deer, Hark scampered across the open lot, bare black feet sowing puffs of dust, the barnyard cat fleeing his approach, goose and gander too, cumbersomely flapping their flightless wings, emitting dismal honking sounds as they waddled from his path. On he came past us, looking neither left nor right, eyes round and white as eggshells, and we could hear the voice The Confessions of Nat Turner
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    panting ah-ah-ah as he sprinted for the woods, moving now with such nimble-footed speed that he seemed whisked forward like a sail on the wind. Far behind, losing ground each second, came the pimpled boy, still howling. “Stop! You, Hark! Black wretch!
    Stop!” But Hark’s great legs were churning as if propelled by steam; vaulting the pump trough, he soared through the air in a gigantic leap like something suspended by wire or wings, struck the earth with a thumping sound, and without breaking stride, bounded on toward the distant forest, the inside of his bare soles flashing splendidly pink. Then all of a sudden it was as if he had been felled by a cannon ball: his head snapped back, and the rest of him including his pinwheeling legs sailed out and forward, and he came down flat on his back with a bladdery, sacklike thud, directly beneath the clothesline which, at gullet level, had intercepted his flight. But as Cobb and I stood watching, watched him shake his head and try to rise up on his elbows, we saw now not one but two forces, though equally sinister and somber, converging on Hark from opposite directions: Putnam, still waving his lightwood stick, and Miss Maria Pope, who had appeared as if from nowhere like some augury of frustrate bitchery and vengeance, bearing down upon Hark with a hobbled spinster’s gait amid black snapping yards of funereal gingham.
    Blown back on the wind, her voice already was hysteric with shrill malevolence. “It’s up the tree for you, nigger!” she screeched. “Up the tree!”
    “Now,” I heard Cobb murmur, “now we are about to witness a ritual diversion indigenous to this Southern clime. We are about to witness two human beings whipping another.”
    “No, mastah,” I said. “Marse Joe don’t ’low his niggers to be beaten. But there’s ways around that, as you will surely see. You about to witness something else, mastah.”
    “Not a speck of charcoal in the shop!” Putnam was shouting in a kind of wail.
    “And not a drap of water in the kitchen pail!” Miss Maria shrilled.
    As if vying with each other to be the chiefest victim of Hark’s enormity, they surrounded him, encompassed the prostrate form, squawking like birds. Hark staggered to his feet, shaking his head with the slow, stunned, dizzy bewilderment of an about-to-be-slaughtered ox that has received a faulty glancing blow. “It’s up the tree with him this time, impudent black scoundrel!” Miss Maria cackled. “Putnam, get the ladder!”
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    “Hark’s most dreadful feared of heights,” I found myself explaining to Cobb. “This for him is worse than a hundred beatings.”
    “A fantastic specimen!” Cobb breathed. “A regular gladiator , a veritable black Apollo. And swift as a race horse! Where did your master get him?”
    “From up Sussex way,” I said, “about ten, eleven years ago, mastah, when they broke up one of the old plantations.” I paused for a moment, half wondering to myself why I was proffering all this information. “Hark’s all forlorn now,” I went on, “heartsick and forlorn. On the outside he’s very cheery, but inside he’s just all torn up. He can’t keep his mind on anything. That’s how come he forgets his chores, and how come he gets punished. Poor old Hark . . .”
    “Why is that, preacher?” said Cobb. Putnam had fetched a ladder now from the barn, and we watched the procession as it made its way across the windswept lot, bleak and gray